1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer network management and, more particularly, to systems and methods for providing restartable provisioning of software components.
2. Description of the Related Art
Deploying a solution in a data-center requires the installation and configuration of several software components across multiple tiers. Each software component needs to be independently installed and configured. This task is usually done manually or using provisioning tools such as IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager™ for automated provisioning. Failure during installation/configuration of any component results in the scrapping of the provisioning run and restarting the provisioning, as individual components are often linked together through configurations that make the selective unconfiguration/uninstallation difficult.
Prior work on checkpoint/restart for single process components focuses on the installation and failure recovery of one or more related components within a single node environment. Additionally, several patents with related techniques include the following. U.S. Pat. No. 6,453,430, entitled, “Apparatus and methods for controlling restart conditions of a faulted process”, focuses on recovery strategies for processing failure within a single node with multiple and varied recovery steps. U.S. Pat. No. 5,923,833, entitled, “Restart and recovery of OMG-compliant transaction systems”, focuses on restart and recovery techniques in a transaction system. U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,499, entitled, “Scheme for restarting processes at distributed checkpoints in client-server computer system”, focuses on a distributed method of restarting processes across a plurality of nodes in the event of a failure in one, without looking at the process of provisioning, capturing global state, or providing for rollback capabilities.
The traditional approaches to handling failures and restartability do not work because at least taking a consistent distributed checkpoint is not feasible in these methods.